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allowed to marry the waitress (no longer a “city goddess” once news arrived of the Watergate scandal) after the Cultural Revolution.
    By that time, I had started studying aviation science in college.

Pill and Picture
(1976)
    This is the last issue of
Red Dust Lane Blackboard Newsletter
for the year 1976. It was a year full of significant events for China. In January, Premier Zhou Enlai passed away, and more than a million people lined the main streets of the capital to express grief and pay tribute to him. At Chairman Mao’s suggestion, Hua Guofeng served as the acting premier. In April, people’s mourning of the beloved premier at Tiananmen Square was condemned as a “counterrevolutionary incident” and suppressed by force. Deng Xiaoping was removed from all his posts inside and outside the Party. In July, Zhu De, Chairman of NPC, died at the age of eighty-nine. The city of Tangshan was struck by an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, and more than 242,000 people were killed. In September, our great leader Mao Zedong, Chairman of CPC, also passed away. In October, the Party authorities took decisive measures, detaining the Gang of Four headed by MadamMao. The CPC Central Committee appointed Hua Guofeng chairman of CPC Central Committee and Central Military Commission. China has finally turned over the page after ten years of the Cultural Revolution.
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    On a summer afternoon in 1976, Peng Guoqiang had a long, drawn-out discussion with a group of his fellow Red Guards about a poem he had written in praise of Chairman Mao, but what he really was trying to achieve was to impress Jianyin, a pretty girl in the group. During those years, it was out of the question for young people to talk to each other (except about Mao and the Cultural Revolution), let alone date.
    The poem was a difficult one. Peng worked hard on the refrain, “a long life to Chairman Mao, a long, long life,” trying to rhyme “life” with “strife” and “rife,” but someone in the group objected, saying that the rhyming words did not appear proper—that they did not carry enough thematic respect for the organic tone of the poem. It was a tough question. To Peng’s surprise, Jianyin supported his effort, saying that the rhyming words did not have to carry reverential meaning in themselves. Her statement was like a cart of charcoal sent in the winter. Afterward, even more to his surprise, as she left the classroom, a small picture of hers fell out of her purse, a picture of a spirited Red Guard with her armband shining in the sunlight and a gold badge of Mao radiating on her youthful bosom. As he picked it up, he wondered whether it was a coincidence but decidednot to bother with the question—at least, not while he tried to decide whether or not to return it to her.
    Instead of going back home to Red Dust Lane, he went to Bund Park by himself, sitting at a small café there, working and reworking the poem, smoking, stirring the black coffee with a spoon of “political correctness.” It was a hard job. He cudgeled his brains out searching for some other words to rhyme with “life,” thinking of Jianyin’s smile flashing in the sunlight. After he had downed three cups of coffee in quick succession, he was seized with an impulse to rhyme “life” with “die” and “expire,” as if possessed. The blasphemous counterrevolutionary lines kept rushing, irrepressibly, onto the tip of his tongue. Sweating all over, trembling like a fallen leaf in the wind, he nearly suffocated himself by stuffing a fist into his mouth, as if battling a terrible toothache.
    Running out of the park, he scurried home, skunklike, to a handful of sedatives from the medicine cabinet. Not counting the pills, he swallowed them and passed out.
    He awoke at midnight, still shaking like a scared scarecrow. The inexplicable impulse was gone—but what if the compulsion